The Kochs' plan to beat Harry Reid

LAS VEGAS — Harry Reid’s reelection is more than two years off, but the Koch brothers’ political machine is already methodically laying the groundwork that will be used to try to take him out.

The efforts in recent months have been largely subterranean, but they are unmistakable. A handful of nonprofit groups in the vast political network helmed by allies of the conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch have established or expanded permanent ground operations in Reid’s backyard. Focused on wooing key demographics like Latinos and veterans, they’ve also paid for adsassailing the Senate Democratic leader.

Intensifying and complicating the competition is that allies of Reid and the Koch are assiduously courting the wild-card donor who could dictate the terms of his race, casino mogul Sheldon Adelson. He is a friend and constituent of Reid’s, but sources say Koch operatives raised more than $20 million from him in 2012, and they’re working to secure additional funding.

The high-level jockeying on both sides is particularly striking given that there is so little top-tier political activity in Nevada this fall. Both camps insist they’re focused entirely on the policy repercussions of 2014 midterm elections across the country. But it’s hard not to detect an intensely personal tension underlying the Koch-Reid dynamic.

While there’s been some speculation that Reid might retire rather than run for reelection if Democrats lose control of the Senate this fall, the 74-year-old, in interviews with POLITICO, seemed almost giddy about the prospects of facing down the Kochs in 2016. So fixated is Reid that for a time this summer he kept on his desk in the Capitol a cartoon clipped from the pages of a July issue of the New Yorker magazine depicting a Scout leader reading from a book to his troop sitting around a campfire. “Run everybody, run for your life,” the leader says. “It’s them, it’s the Koch brothers.”

The attacks have motivated the very rich conservatives who help fund the Koch political operation. At the brothers’ annual summer donor seminar in June, organizers erected a life-sized cardboard cutout of Reid, his arms spread and his mouth agape as if in midspeech. Emanating from it was a cartoon-like quote bubble with the word “Un-American.”

Cardboard Harry was the object of derision, said attendees. “These donors are competitive, and competitive people like to see the competition,” said one. “They get fired up by competition.”

While Reid’s attacks don’t seem to be resonating deeply with the American public as a whole, they may help whip up Democratic donors and activists this fall. And, while Reid can be coy on the subject, he appears intent on using the tactic on his own base headed into 2016.

As Reid last week ambled from an SUV to a side entrance of an MGM Grand here for a speech to the supportive United Steelworkers International Convention, he told POLITICO he wasn’t worried about the Koch forces’ buildup in his backyard. “I’ve always been targeted. … That’s not news,” he said, playfully dismissing a question about whether there was a personal element to the Koch effort. “I don’t see that they have any reason to come after me. Why would they?”

But a few minutes later, after taking the stage to Bob Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up,” Reid confided to 2,500 cheering union members that, in fact, he is trying to personally antagonize the Kochs.

“Ladies and gentlemen, when I was walking in here today, somebody grabbed me from one of the Washington publications and said ‘the Koch brothers say they’re here organizing in Nevada,’” Reid regaled the crowd. “I said ‘why would they be worried about me? What have I done to bother them?’”

After allowing a brief, dramatic pause, he answered his own question boastfully: “Only everything I can, right?”

The line sparked some of the lustier applause of a 20-minute speech that went on to include several swipes at the Kochs. They “have a fundamental belief that our government should have one purpose and one purpose only, and that’s to help the Kochs get richer. They don’t care about the middle class,” Reid charged.

Reid would be well-served to take seriously the prospect of a major Koch-funded challenge, asserted John Gopsill, a local Nevada leader in the steelworkers union, after Reid addressed the convention. “I don’t think he can raise the kind of money the Koch brothers can bring to this state, and, unfortunately, money talks,” Gopsill said. “That’s why we have to get out on the ground and knock on doors and make phone calls. I really and truly believe that’s how we’ll win it for him.”

KOCH-FRIENDLY TURF

The race for Reid’s seat is expected to be among the top 2016 priorities for Republicans, who are likely to be playing defense in most Senate races. Nevada could be a rare exception, owing partly to Reid’s less-than-stellar approval ratings, and it’s also primed to be a top swing state in the presidential campaign.

Even before Reid picked his fight with the Kochs, their operation had been investing heavily in Nevada, which has a libertarian streak that comports well with the small-government, free-enterprise sensibility shared by most of the Koch-backed groups.

The most muscular of the groups, Americans for Prosperity, first established a presence here in 2009. It’s continually expanded since, opening a new office in April on the western edge of Vegas, out of which four full-time employees work. There’s also a full-time field director in Northern Nevada, and AFP is looking to hire two more executives in the state, where it has roughly 50,000 registered activists statewide.

The Koch-backed veterans outreach group Concerned Veterans for America has four employees in Nevada. While only one is full-time, it’s looking to hire a full-time local director “to oversee and execute the organization’s grass-roots efforts in Nevada.” CVA has more than 800 active volunteers, a handful of whom paid a visit to Reid’s Nevada office in May to pressure him to support reforms to the Department of Veterans Affairs. It followed up by spending $50,000 on a June digital campaign accusing Reid of “putting his loyalty to his party and the president ahead of America’s veterans.”

And the LIBRE Initiative, which seeks to spread fiscal conservatism among Hispanics, has also committed significant resources to Nevada since first setting up shop here in 2012. Back then, it shared space in AFP’s Vegas office, but this year it moved into a new office of its own across the street from a wedding venue called the “ElvisChapel.” An April ribbon-cutting was attended by at least one GOP congressional candidate, and the group now has two full-time staffers and a growing volunteer base in the state.